District 65/202 and ISBE Datasets
A quick inventory of two datasets that I use for research, available to you for free!
FOIAGRAS is a free newsletter run by Tom Hayden (FOIA GRAS LLC) that explores various topics in local Evanston (and now North Suburban Chicago) Governance. I publish and share all my data and reports. Subscribing is free, so please subscribe or share. Email (tom@foiagras.com) or comment with issues or mistakes.
The first dataset I make available is a digitized version of all Illinois School Districts (excluding CPS) Annual Statement of Affairs Vendors (view file). This contains a list of any vendor who did any work with any District in Illinois. It’s useful if you want to search for a specific vendor and see if they worked for other Districts.1
Digitizing this file was quite difficult, I had to download around 800 different statements from the ISBE and hired someone to write an Excel Macro to export the data required here. If you find any issues, please let me know.
On this spreadsheet, there are also tabs for District 65 and ETHS (District 202). These reflect all payments made to vendors from either District in SY20232. For instance, you can find in SY2023, District 65 spent $29,186.74 with the Grecian Kitchen.
Data for This Year
Since the prior dataset only goes through July 2023, you can view everything up to the present for District 65 in this datasheet, which is the digitized “List of Bills” from board meetings. This dataset contains two tabs, one for all the bills paid and another tab for the totals by vendor. This is where you can find the potentially newsworthy items. For instance;
District 65 has paid the architects Cordogan-Clark $6,570,396.83 in the period July 2023 - Feb 2024.
Grecian Kitchen expenses have been $8,393.65 since July 2023.
In January 2024, District 65 paid $30,000 to “SHERYL RING WEIKAL CLIENT TRUST ACCOUNT” which appears to be some kind of legal settlement.
Noteable is that Ms. Weikal is the lawyer who represented District 65 Assistant Principal Ms. Sebaggala in her case against a District 219 parent,which was dismissed, resulting in Ms. Sebaggala owing legal fees. I’ll be FOIA’ing a copy of this settlement agreement.(Update: this is a payment unrelated to the D219 case)
If you find any issues or anything interesting in the data, please let me know: tom@foiagras.com
The filters are very slow on Google Sheets, you may want to download the file locally to do filtering.
SY = School Year = July to June
This is so disturbing on so many levels. The architects fees are so ridiculously high relative to the budget for the school and reflects total mismanagement of the process. Find a commercial project with accountable fiduciaries where $6.5M has been spent for a $40M project that HASN’T BROKEN GROUND!
Regarding the legal fees to the attorney for the teacher, this is 100% and needs to be investigated. Her lawsuit had nothing to do with D65. She brought a lawsuit against an organization for defamation and lost. It had nothing to do with D65 and there is no way they can use taxpayer money to do this.
Grecian Kitchen….sigh.
I have a love/hate relationship with FOIA Gras. I love reading it, but I hate how my blood boils thinking about what this current BoA is doing to our district and city. I saw an old classmate on the riff list last time. We are not at an age where you want to be looking to start over in your career, but looking towards winding it down. They will land somewhere and be ok, I am sure. But I find it so aggravating that while Rome burns, architects get fat paychecks, and the admin continues so say “Let them eat cake (or gyros).” The Board spends other people’s money and it shows. Where is the edict from on high to stop any and all non-essential spending? If your latest tax bill wasn’t a wake up call, wait until the next assessment. Our district is in shambles financially. Where do you all think the shortfalls will come from? Your pockets, and at the expense of your kids. When the other schools start closing, prepare for your kids to get bussed because there is no neighborhood school. (Which is NOT a big deal. I took a school bus in this city across town and lived to tell the tale. That’s not my point.) It’s the irony of ending up needing bussing because your plan to end bussing caused more bussing. So much avoidable waste and expense, all so those ridiculous people could get their backs slapped by a conman and self-righteously believe they fixed racism in our horrible city. They’ve illegally finagled funds to build a school we didn’t need in order to “fix” something that happened 60 years ago, to help one segment of the population that isn’t even the majority of the ward anymore. Meanwhile, the fastest-growing segment in the area gets screwed because their beloved TWI school got demolished, and they can’t even have the new school in their ward house it. And at least two other schools will have to go to pay for this civil rights win, and the remaining schools will still not get the infrastructure repairs they need funding for. Teachers will be axed (maybe they can reapply at the new Devon Horton Elementary school??), student-facing potions will be eliminated, they will ask for money via a referendum (DON’T YOU DARE VOTE YES- YOU CANNOT TRUST THESE PEOPLE TO SPEND IT WISELY). I don’t want to be all doom and gloom, but despite many kids having a great year and things for most (white) students going swimmingly, the fact is this district has many, many problems. Chief among them is no matter how much money they throw at whatever butterfly flits by and distracts them, they cannot seem to properly educate the minority student population, and in fact are sending kids unprepared educationally for the rigors of high school and beyond AND who are undisciplined and causing havoc in the halls of ETHS. There needs to be a housecleaning in district 65. What is it going to take for this city to realize it?